PowerNote

Brendan Dawes writes in his tasty new blog, that PowerPoint must die, being guilty as it is, for crimes against good design. His point being that it’s hard for any designer to make PowerPoint turn out anything that looks decent. Fonts look dreadful, the colour palette is very limited and [there are no] guides. Brendan implies that a contributing factor is the lack of competition to PowerPoint, and so he leads us gleefully to Keynote, Apple’s recently released PowerPoint rival.

Perhaps with the likes of Brendan Dawes at the helm, Keynote could indeed be a powerful tool, but in the hands of John-the-middle-manager, would Keynote really produce better presentations than PowerPoint? Consider how Apple introduce their software:

Keynote makes it a snap to create cinema-quality presentations with professional-caliber themes, razor-sharp text and beautiful charts and tables. Make layered images with transparent graphics and text, and adjust the transparency of each layer as you choose. Move from one slide to the next with 3D transitions. Control the pace of your presentation with stunning animations.

It’s clear which market they are aiming for. And judging from the examples Apple have splattered over their Keynote pages, the end results will be the same old embellished graphs and vacuous bullet points, but with more colours and better rendered text. Having said that, I know which software I’d rather use.